Democracy | Constitution | Parliament | Executive | Voting & Elections | Political Parties | Pressure Groups | Foreign Policy

   Media | Issues | Law | 1975 Dismissal | State & Local Government | News | Sounds | Political Words | USA | Watergate | UK | Exams

  Wednesday January 20, 2010  Print  

HOME

U.S.A. INDEX

Introduction

USA News Items

President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society Speech
1998-2007 i
j
k
l
m
n This Site j
k
l
m
n Web
1964 Search
System Overview

Australia-USA This is the text of LBJ's Great Society speech, reproduced from the Public Papers of the Presidents of
Comparison
the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, Book I (1963-64), p704-707.
Constitution
- Full Text

Presidency President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and Hart, Congressmen
- George W. Bush Meader and Staebler, and other members of the fine Michigan delegation, members
- Ex-Presidents of the graduating class, my fellow Americans:
Bill Clinton
- Speeches It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been coeducational since
- Impeachment 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis of your accomplishments that a
- Senate Verdicts Detroit high school girl said, "In choosing a college, you first have to decide whether
you want a coeducational school or an educational school."
Executive Arm

Congress
Well, we can find both here at Michigan, although perhaps at different hours.
- House of Reps
- Senate
I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student whose father told a friend of mine
Supreme Court
that his son's education had been a real value. It stopped his mother from bragging about him.
Political Parties
- Republican Party I have come today from the turmoil of your Capital to the tranquillity of your campus to speak about
- Democratic Party
the future of your country.
Elections
- President The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue
- House
the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.
- Senate
- States
For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon
States
unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.
- States Info

Money/Lobbying The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and
Foreign Policy elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
- Terrorism

Historic Documents
Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where
progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under
Watergate unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society
and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
American Politics
Journal
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial
Sound Archive injustice, to which we are totally committed in out time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his
talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of
boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body
and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own
sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more
concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished
work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our
lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society -- in our
cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million
Americans -- four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will
double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those
built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban
United States.

Aristotle said: "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the
good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.

The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is
not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old
landmarks are violated.

Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors
and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.

Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and
innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.

New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city
a place where future generations will come, not only to live but to live the good life.

I understand that if I stayed here tonight I would see that Michigan students are really doing their best
to live the good life.

This is the place where the Peace Corps was started. It is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are
in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people.

A second place where we begin to build the Great Society is in our countryside. We have always prided
 ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today
that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are
threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and
dense forests are disappearing.

A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the "Ugly American." Today we must act to prevent
an ugly America.

For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once
man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be
wasted.

A third place to build the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 is in the classrooms of America. There your children's
lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest
reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5
years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million -- more than
onequarter of all America -- have not even finished high school.

Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because
they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today's youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary
school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million.
College enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.

In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers
are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to
sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an
escape from poverty.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which
grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing
youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques
of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

These are three of the central issues of the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 . While our Government has many
programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.

But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all
over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a
series of White House conferences and meetings -- on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of
education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and
from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.

The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely
solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of
cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.

Woodrow Wilson once wrote: "Every man sent out from his university should be a man of his Nation as
well as a man of his time."

Within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us toward a way of life beyond the realm
of our experience, almost beyond the bounds of our imagination.

For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and
to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any
age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be
realized in the life of the Nation.

So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law
requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?

Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?

Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace -- as neighbors
and not as mortal enemies?

Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the
foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?

There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless
wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your
will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.

Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world.
So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us
from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a
long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.

Thank you. Good-bye.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------

Contents | What's New | Notoriety | Amazon Books | ©Copyright | Contact

whitlamdismissal.com | watergate.info | malcolmfarnsworth.com
http://australianpolitics.com/usa/historic/1964_great- society.shtml
©Copyright australianpolitics.com 1 9 9 5- 2 0 0 9